Maximizing LinkedIn for Sales and Social Media Marketing: An Unofficial, Practical Guide to Selling & Developing B2B Business On LinkedIn. Neal Schaffer
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the top 15 industries represented on LinkedIn (shown in Figure 2.1) reveals that, even with the combined number of users who categorize their profiles under human resources or staffing and recruitment, these industries do not make the list. Based on this statistic, recruiters make up only about one percent of all LinkedIn users, which means that the majority of networking done on LinkedIn is not related to job searches at all.
If you’re still not convinced that LinkedIn offers value for your company, I’d ask you to consider these points on why representation and engagement on LinkedIn is critical for any business:
LINKEDIN PROFILES AND COMPANIES PAGES ARE FREE YELLOW PAGES. Many businesses and professionals are using LinkedIn as they would the phone book, looking for experienced, qualified, and recommended service providers, businesses, and professionals. When someone needs insight or information about your industry, is your company or sales personnel being found? And if they are found, can non-paying LinkedIn members easily contact them?
NO OTHER TOOL MAKES IT AS EASY TO CONNECT TO DECISION MAKERS. Search, find, and ask for an introduction. To simplify the process, LinkedIn gives you tools to conveniently facilitate this every step of the way. Considering how easy it is to network with others on LinkedIn, you may wonder what business development professionals did before its creation.
YOU CAN GAIN MINDSHARE WITH POTENTIAL CUSTOMERS. Companies invest in search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing to help potential customers find them online, and they use email marketing to help gain mindshare with clients on a regular basis. With the time, effort, and money spent to reach potential and current customers, it only makes sense to maintain a presence on LinkedIn, which is currently the 16th most visited website in the world,8 so that your company, products, and employees are the hot topics in your industry.
LINKEDIN HAS BECOME AN INCREASINGLY IMPORTANT SOURCE OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE. With so many professionals having so many conversations and sharing so much information about themselves via their profiles on LinkedIn, platforms such as LinkedIn Companies and applications such as LinkedIn Signal are now providing a unique source of business intelligence for free, some of which cannot even be found on paid services such as Hoovers or OneSource.
LinkedIn vs. Facebook: Which Is Right for Your Company?
Early in my social media consulting career, I received a request for a proposal from a niche B2B software company. The director of marketing stated that her company had already started utilizing social media, and when I asked what they had done, she mentioned that they had created a Facebook Fan Page. Sigh.
Successful social media marketing is about knowing where your customers are and establishing a presence there. It is clear that professionals from all demographics are spending a great deal of time with social media, and that Facebook is the main networking site where we spend—or waste—our time. However, simply because many people are on Facebook doesn’t mean it’s the best use of time and effort for businesses. If you asked most people what they use certain social networking channels for, they would likely say that Facebook is for private use and LinkedIn is for business. That is, most people—including the decision makers with whom you want to connect—use Facebook to keep in touch with friends and family. LinkedIn, on the other hand, is viewed by professionals as a trusted place to network. Not only is the perceived purpose of each site different, but so is the demographic; many more-experienced professionals are not represented on Facebook, and those that are don’t engage on fan pages as much. LinkedIn may have fewer users, but the professional mindset and ability to network with other people who are on the site for the same reason makes LinkedIn a much more valuable tool for B2B companies than Facebook.
Admittedly, there are many similarities between Facebook and LinkedIn. For example, both Facebook and LinkedIn offer platforms so that people can become a part of a business’ community. On Facebook these are called fan pages, and on LinkedIn these are called companies pages. Facebook Fan Pages allow people to interact via wall postings while LinkedIn Companies Pages allow professionals to recommend company products and services as well as add comments to their recommendations. LinkedIn followers can see who in their network made what company recommendations just as Facebook users can see which of their friends like certain pages. LinkedIn has a widget that allows anyone to recommend your products and services on LinkedIn from any website, which is similar to Facebook Social Plugins.
However, a closer comparison of the two platforms demonstrates how LinkedIn provides better B2B business opportunities than Facebook:
LINKEDIN ALLOWS FOR MORE TARGETED PROFESSIONAL COMMUNITY BUILDING. Just as you can create an ad on Facebook prompting consumers to “like” your page, similar ads on LinkedIn beckon professionals to “recommend” products and services. Above and beyond recommending a business, though, LinkedIn’s feature to follow a company allows you to “like” it simply by following it. As a result, these follower numbers have grown over time and companies such as Hewlett-Packard have (at the time of writing this book) amassed more than 285,000 followers.9 Compare this to the 315,000 fans HP’s Facebook Page10 has. Though the LinkedIn Companies Page for HP has slightly fewer followers than its Facebook Fan Page, those following the LinkedIn page are much more relevant to the business aspect of the company simply due to the professional demographic of LinkedIn.
LINKEDIN ALLOWS FOR MORE ROBUST INTERACTION BETWEEN COMPANIES AND FOLLOWERS. On Facebook, businesses are fairly restricted to fan pages, but LinkedIn offers the ability to build a public community of professionals with LinkedIn Groups in addition to the company page functionality. (Groups will be explained in more detail in Chapter 6.) Having a LinkedIn Group offers distinct advantages over a Facebook Fan Page; content from the outside world, including your website, can be shared directly in LinkedIn Groups with the LinkedIn share button, which can now be easily embedded into websites just as Twitter’s retweet and Facebook’s share buttons are. LinkedIn’s button is the more comprehensive feature, however, because it allows you to simultaneously share website content on your profile as well as directly to LinkedIn Groups.
LINKEDIN OFFERS BETTER PAGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS. Many Facebook Fan Page administrators have problems managing their pages efficiently because settings don’t allow for specific content control. However, LinkedIn has several moderation tools built into the groups that allow for granular detail regarding who can post what. For instance, the process for LinkedIn Group administrators to search through members, see when they joined the group, add them as managers, delete them, or delete and block them is simple. Facebook does not offer this extensive collection of features. In this respect, LinkedIn Groups are at the cutting edge of community management on any major social media site.
PUBLIC ACCESS ALLOWS FOR GREATER ENGAGEMENT WITH INTERESTED PEOPLE AND INCREASED VISIBILITY. Up until recently, Facebook Fan Pages had been the open arena in which people could engage. Previously, the problem with LinkedIn Groups was that they were private worlds; unless you were a member of that group, you couldn’t see inside it. The openness of Facebook Pages and the associated potential SEO benefits attracted companies to create pages and send more advertising revenue to Facebook. However, LinkedIn recently began to allow existing groups to become public and new public-only groups to be created.
It’s worth noting that the largest LinkedIn Group at the time this book was written, Job Openings, Job Leads and Job Connections!,11 had more than 450,000 members, while Facebook’s own page12 had more than 46 million fans. However, the number of LinkedIn Groups (more than 960,00013) was not that far behind that of the 1.3 million+ Facebook Pages.14 As more of the legacy LinkedIn Groups go public, they will flood the search engines with enough content to rival that of Facebook in due time. An increasing number of group discussions will come up in long tail search results, which will drive more traffic to LinkedIn and result in higher membership numbers in groups. Now that Facebook Fan Pages and public LinkedIn Groups offer virtually the same benefits regarding SEO and visibility, there is little reason for companies not to be active on LinkedIn.
GROUP MEMBERS ARE ALLOWED MORE ROOM FOR IN-DEPTH CONVERSATION. The engagement on LinkedIn Groups is significant because there is a lot of room for discussion; users are not confined to small status update boxes